High-Speed Internet Spawns Prairie Start-Ups

Around the corner from an antiques district in Kansas City, Kan., a group of entrepreneurs and computer programmers are trying to spawn a six-block Silicon Valley in a quiet, residential area that on Tuesday began boasting the world’s fastest residential Internet service.

Google Inc. chose Spring Valley and Hanover Heights, a strip of homes just south of the University of Kansas Medical Center, as the first neighborhoods to receive a fiber-optic broadband network that boasts speeds up to 150 times as fast as the average online feed in the U.S.

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